As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, the wireless or mobile telephone is no longer simply used for voice communications. Although voice communications remain a primary purpose for many of these communication devices, these devices are being called on to provide the same communication data exchange services demanded by the hard wired communication systems including the transmission of vast amounts of data such as provided through public and private internet connections. However, there exists a substantial infrastructure in place for wireless communication systems. Therefore, the additional challenges of compatibility and incorporation of the existing infrastructure is required while still providing the new services at a reasonable and competitive cost.
Data provided through the internet is available under many different conditions. Some data is free, and other data is provided at different costs and rates. In addition, communication service providers often provide subscription programs with various incentives and variable charges per data bit. Further, for a given service provider, these charges may change as a function of call volume, subscriber location, time of day, and the like. Therefore, to be cost competitive, the wireless service provider should be able to also provide such variable rates.
To accomplish this, recent wireless communications have evolved from the original analog cellular or mobile telephones which used TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and was almost entirely limited to voice communications. TDMA was also used with second-generation digital mobile cellular phones that transmitted voice data in digital packets. Transmission by digital packets, however, readily lends itself to the transmission or exchange of vast amounts of non-voice data as well as voice data. In fact, because of the requirements that voice data must be provided at regular and precise intervals if it is to be understood, voice data presents some challenges not present with ordinary or non-voice digital data. In any event, the demands for transmitting various types of digital data has recently exploded, and the processing or packaging of non-voice digital data for transmission over wireless communication systems has developed separately from the processing and packaging of voice data packets. Consequently, the two types of data packets are processed separately and then merged and transmitted over both the second-generation TDMA systems and third generation CDMA (Code Division Multiplex Access) type systems. It should also be noted that CDMA is also used in 2G cellular networks like Sprint PCS and Verizon. It is not required that 3G systems use CDMA, but systems presently being developed are using CDMA.